about

Radian Releases: founded by Radian in 2014 in order to
release special Radian projects and limited edition goodies.
1st release is the long-anticipated collaboration with Howe
Gelb, singer and frontman of alt-country legends Giant Sand.
In cooperation with Trost Records.

The seemingly curious collaboration. A wrangling and grappling, a
confrontation, a quarrel. A checking-out, a weighing of compromises.

The Viennese trio Radian has recorded an album with songwriter Howe
Gelb from Tuscon, Arizona. Here the situation is different:
"Radian Verses Howe Gelb" is primarily a Radian release. "This is a
Radian album. I'm only living in it" Howe Gelb went on record,
modestly.
In four sessions that were rather freely dispersed over time, Howe
Gelb, usually devoting himself to a cosmopolitan rethinking of
Americana and Desert Country in his day job, fed acoustic contributions
into the microphone for Radian: piano, guitar, above all: voice.
Sometimes as a reaction to material prepared by Radian, sometimes
pulled liberally and unexpectedly rom his own vast and tangled pool of
ideas.

The tones of Howe Gelb provided further material for Radian:
They were dissected, dissolved, reoriented, mutated and made to fit
into their own world. Radian Verses Howe Gelb is the first Radian
release with guitarist Martin Siewert, who joined the band in 2011
and here is also responsible for processing and sound treatment. As
usual, drummer Martin Brandlmayr was in charge of the selection and
arrangement of sounds, and John Norman of the bass. As always with
Radian, this record resembles a particularly carefully and cautiously
assembled collage: Sounds, tones, noises - the tracks are busy. They
are teeming, quavering, vibrating. As before, the kinds of things that
Brandlmayr, Norman and Siewert scrape and tease out of their machines
and instruments make up an exuberant buffet of ideas and strangeness.
42 minutes of sound of unidentified origin. The way the sounds are
arranged here however creates an aura of fragility, a lean design.
No showing off, no flooding, no bells and whistles. The tones appear
to be artfully suspended in space, you can feel the air flowing between
them.

Which means that Radian's manipulations and reshapings didn't go as
far as fixing the musician Howe Gelb beyond repair or destroying him in
the process. That cannot be the point. So you can hear that this bent
man, croaking and whining to us here, that's Howe Gelb. And so sections
of songs, melodies, narratives remain intact. Songwriting in the
process of disintegration, and in penetration, entanglement and fusion
with highly focused free music.

The claim that's often made and often void - here it is true:
The categories crumble away. Whether jazz, intricate
tinker-electronics, dub, growling, hissing, bubbling, rock as well - a
lot of things wondrously permeate this music, one that is indeed rather
post-everything. A music that is hard to get a grasp on and yet does,
here and there, again and again, summon the pleasant impulse we call
"groove". Let's meet at the outermost fringes.